Need to rephrase

The Great Train Robbery (1903)- historical film

With the rise of the self-sufficient woman, the male-defying woman, the single mother, the working class female and the female bosses in society there has been a rise of women in film who are meet these same characteristics.

Society has also affected the representation of females; with a rise of independent women, single mothers, working class female and female bosses, the characters in recent films now meet these same characteristics.

The successful female action films up until recently have featured what were essentially women playing men. Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in the first two Alien films, Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Brigette Nielsen in Red Sonya were women who shared similar characteristics: strong, muscular, hard-edged and essentially masculine characters who wield large guns and swords as though they are substitute phalluses. They are not overtly sexual beings but instead are women who can step into roles that could easily be occupied by men.

Women in action films, are considered to be playing men, because of their similar characteristics.
Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in the first two Alien films and Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, are strong, muscular and have no emotions. They also carry similar weapons, guns and swords, however this can suggest Freud's theory, that women are in need of anything shaped like a phallus.

The journey from Sigourney Weaver's desexualized Ripley in Alien to Angelina Jolie's sexually charged Lara Croft in Tomb Raider has marked something of a sea change in popular conceptions of gender.

Ripley is desexualized, and Lara Croft is sxually charged.

Many of these heroines are based in stereotypical roles such as the dominatrix, which has long been a transgressive female identity—she both sexually dominates men and exists to satisfy them. Similarly, the female action hero transgresses gender boundaries by occupying traditionally masculine spaces—that of the battlefield, particularly—yet maintains an appearance of hyper-femininity to draw in male viewers and underscore her identity as female.

This marks a change from the 1990s, when female action heroes were either stripped of their feminine sexuality in order to masculinize them enough to carry a weapon, or hyper-sexualized to drive home their masculinity.
For example, the character of Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), was buff to the extreme, but focused only on the safety of her child. In G.I. Jane (1997), Demi Moore's character stripped down to the physical basics until she was nearly indistinguishable, physically, from a man—except for a lack of sexual desire. In The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), Geena Davis' character transformed from stereotypically feminine to stereotypically masculine, complete with a macho sex drive.

“As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look…” (Mulvey 20) Laura Mulvey’s article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

While Scorpio is looked at fetishistically, the gaze upon Bond is more conservative and it is not usually as conspicuous from a female character. We notice the passivity of a female noticing Bond, whereas fetishistic scopophilia is overt and active. In Goldfinger, the audience never takes on the gaze or the POV of a female spectator. We notice that characters such as Pussy Galore and Miss Moneypenny are attracted to Bond, but different conventions are used to articulate this sense of attraction. For instance, the change of intonation in both the voices of Galore and Moneypenny signify an interest in Bond while Bond’s active gaze is the signifier of his female interest. Sociologically speaking, the reason for the subdued female gaze could be a result of prominent ideologies present in the early 1960s. Since the male figure was the dominant of the two sexes, his gaze will be active over the passive one of the female.

Films from the James Bond series, such as Goldfinger, involves the audience, however never taking the point of view of the female spectator. We notice that characters such as Pussy Galore and Miss Moneypenny are attracted to Bond, but different conventions are used to articulate this sense of attraction. For instance, the change of intonation in both the voices of Galore and Moneypenny signify an interest in Bond while Bond’s active gaze is the signifier of his female interest.

Although the female gaze is present in Goldfinger, there is also a gaze casted upon Bond from the male spectator. This is not necessarily a homosexual gaze, nor a heterosexual gaze. It is a gaze that could potentially meet both standards in the sense that both homosexual and heterosexual audiences can identify with the Bond character. For instance, males will tend to idolize Bond because of his smooth McIveresque nature, whereas females will find sexual appeal in Bond. When Bond is tied to the table with the threat of laser castration, the focus is on Bond’s groin area. As we can see, according to Mulvey, Freud’s analysis of the threat of castration is a literal obstacle that Bond must overcome. Although perhaps not consciously intended to be a homosexualized focal point, a gay audience who reads into the Bond films could interpret this scene from a fetishistic standpoint. As with the lingering crotch shot in Scorpio Rising, the Bond crotch shot has the potential to appeal to both a female and gay audience, sexualizing the Bond character.

In a study of the films from the 1930s to 1970s, historians have categorized four dominant types of roles that women played. The first one is the “Pillar of Virtue” types played by Doris Day or Julie Andrews. This category also features mothers and mammies such as Hattie McDaniel’s character in “Gone with the Wind.”The “Glamour Girl” range from sex goddesses such as Marilyn Monroe in “Bus Stop” to femme fatales such as Marlene Dietrich in “Blonde Venus.”The “Emotive Woman” is the sexually frustrated Rosalind Russell in “Picnic” and the seductive Elizabeth Taylor in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Thus, the last category, the “Independent” woman or the Katharine Hepburn type, is Barbara Streisand in “Funny Girl,” or Jane Fonda in “Klute,” the liberated woman.

In the 1950s, especially, we witnessed an era of “reaffirming male dominance and female subservience; movies showed women as breasts and buttocks, again idealizing women who were ‘pretty, amusing, and childish,’” (Butler, 145).